Vaccine Adjuvants

Scope

The vaccine adjuvants program aims to utilise insights in humoral
and cellular immunology and cytokine biology to develop better vaccine adjuvants using and vaccine delivery systems, for human and veterinary applications.

Research outline

Vaccination is one of the most cost-effective procedures to improve
the health of animals and humans. This strategy is widely used in
the control of major human and veterinary diseases and has lead to
the first complete eradication of a human disease. Yet there are still
a large number of infectious diseases in both humans and veterinary
species for which no vaccine is available. Many of these have good
prospects for vaccine development as protective immunity can be developed
after recovering from the disease.

ISCOM Adjuvants

Adjuvants are an important part of any vaccine allowing to modulate the immune response induced to the vaccine antigen. In collaboration with CSL Ltd we are investigating the immunological properties of ISCOM adjuvants in sheep.

ISCOM as seen by electronmicroscopy. The antigen associated to the ISCOM has been made visible using an immunogold staining technique.

Nano-beads Adjuvants

In collaboration with Panvax Ltd, we are investigatig the properties of novel nano-beads adjuvants. These nano-beads are small inert particles that induce strong induce strong immune responses in both mice and sheep. Using afferent lymphatic cannulation we study the interactions between this adjuvant and dendritic cells as they migrate from the site of injection to the local lymph node. These cells a a key component for the induction of immune responses.

Antigen presenting dendritic cellthe first step in the initiation
of an immune response.